SOA continues to evolve through economic downturns and bends in the road. SOA has evolved into a set of underlying principles, concepts, technologies, paradigm and patterns of designing and building software; all predicated on a set of loosely coupled services that collectively support an organization's business processes and goals.These services provides the enterprise with an adaptive or agile capability to morph and transform itself in the face of environmental change.

As we look at the SOA Maturity Model we have called SIMM (Service Integration Maturity Model), we see a clear evolution path:

now we see a lot of interest in paradigms and technologies that are BASED on Service principles, namely

3. SIMM level 6, Virtualized Services, in the form of Software-as-a-service (Saas) and Cloud Computing.

Services have become Pervasive, they can be found in many of the recent initiatives including Mashups, BPM, Infrastructure, Enterprise Architecture, Governance, etc.

The notion of an SOA is finding new applications in new areas and continues to morph and integrate into new things, ingesting new use-cases but retaining the base principles of service-oriented computing.